Alan Richardson makes an interesting argument in "Romanticism and the Colonization of the Feminine," by examining the ways in which male Romantic poets ventured out of their traditional "masculine" roles to acquire traditionally "feminine" characteristics. According to Richardson, male Romantic poets claimed particular characteristics such as sympathy and sensibility as their literature moved from an "Age of Reason" to an "Age of Feeling," thereby taking on characteristics previously allocated to women. These poets couldn't directly take these traits for themselves, however, and often used the women close to them as subjects in order to transfer their "feminine" characteristics to the poet: "Romantic writers could not simply claim emotional intensity and intuition as male prerogatives...[having] relegated sympathy and sensibility to their mothers, wives and sisters, they now sought to reclaim 'feminine' qualities through incorporating something of these same figures" (Richardson 15). So these poets took memories of women, especially from early childhood, and used them in order to participate in emotional sensibility and passion.
By incorporating these female figures into their poetry, some male Romantic poets effectively placed themselves into the private sphere. Richardson writes: "The strategies for absorbing feminine qualities developed by Sensibility and Romantic writers all seem to proceed from early experiences of and fantasies about the mother's body" (15). The figures of mother and home are at the heart of the private sphere, and the trend described above is apparent in at least one of the works of Wordsworth that we have read this semester: "The Two-Part Prelude of 1799." Wordsworth writes:
Blessed the infant babe-
For my best conjectures I would trace
The progress of our being-blest the babe
Nursed in his mother's arms, the babe who sleeps
Upon his mother's breast, who, when his soul
Claims manifest kindred with an earthly soul,
Doth gather passion from his mother's eye. (267-73)
Here, the poet sings the praises of the connection of mother and infant, describing the infant who can gather feeling from a mother's touch and love as "blessed." From the private realm of motherhood comes a quality to be revered and Wordsworth, in this instance, uses the mother as a means to the "feminine" attribute of emotion. Contrasted with another excerpt from the same poem, this concept becomes even more apparent:
Thou, my friend, art one
More deeply read in thy own thoughts, no slave
Of that false secondary power by which
In weakness we create distinctions, then
Believe our puny boundaries are things
Which we perceive, and not which we have made. (249-54)
Addressing his friend Coleridge as a man of introspective feeling, Wordsworth denounces the "false secondary power" of reason in favor of intuition and sensibility. Considering that reason is one of the cornerstones of what we would identify as the private sphere, this passage supports the notion that Wordsworth is breaking out of his appropriated realm, and into another. He values the things gained from his mother more than those of the rational world or society and, corresponding to Richardson's argument, most of these were bestowed upon him as an infant:
From early days,
Beginning not long after that first time
In which, a babe, by intercourse of touch
I held mute dialogues with my mother's heart,
I have endeavoured to display the means
Whereby this infant sensibility,
Great birthright of our being, was in me
Augmented and sustained. (310-17)
It is sensibility, not reason, that is his "great birthright," and he gathers strength from this "feminine" virtue.
While I admire the beauty of Wordsworth's lines, I can't help but wonder where sensibility fits into the character of the mother, or even females in general. That is, it is clear, in The Two-Part Prelude, that the sensibility and emotion acquired from the mother during infancy are positive things for a Romantic poet to have. With his special connection to nature and quest to bring the wonder and spirit of Nature to earth in the language of the "common man," passion is essential. But what about when these traditionally feminine characteristics are brought back to and pinned once again on women? Do sensibility, emotion, and passion retain the high and lofty status they achieve when attached to the male Romantic poet?
According to Anne Mellor, "we often see the [male] poet appropriating whatever of the feminine he deems valuable and then consigning the rest either to silence or to the category of evil" (Romanticism & Gender 27). The characteristics that seem valuable to these poets are emotion, compassion, maternal love, and sensibility. Richardson points out that "if femininity was privileged by male writers during the Romantic period it was by the same token debased: If women were valued for natural, intuitive feeling, so were children and idiots" (16). The "feminine" characteristics appropriated by some male Romantic poets become valued, but if those same characteristics are revealed in women's writing, they are trivialized.
It seems to me that when the male Romantic poets took on "femininity," or wandered into the private sphere it was OK-they were becoming "whole" human beings. In a kind of "Romantic androgyny," these poets used sensibility as a means to becoming more complete people, more complete poets. For example, in "Fears in Solitude," Coleridge laments his extraordinary sensibility as a poet because he must feel the suffering of his fellow people. When we discussed this poem in class, nobody questioned Coleridge's masculinity, or labeled him "weak," when we read lines such as:
My God! it is a melancholy thing
For such a man, who would full fain preserve
His soul in calmness, yet perforce must feel
For all his human brethren-O my God,
It is indeed a melancholy thing,
And weighs upon the heart, that he must think
This way or that way o'er these silent hills-(29-36)
Coleridge fears for those who may be killed if the French army invades England, and expresses his fear through poetry. He feels for them, and it is beautiful. He is most certainly sensible and emotional.
However, when we look at these characteristics in relation to women poets, in their essentially "original" home of the private sphere they are trivialized. That is, in relation to women, emotion, compassion, maternal love and sensibility are still seen as "soft," existing on a lower plane than more "serious" or difficult matters of rational feeling. For example, when we read Charlotte Smith's sonnets in class, she was labeled as "whiny" and "too emotional," even though she was expressing sentiments similar to those of Coleridge. In the first selection from "Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poetry," she, too, laments the idea that, as a poet, she has the deep sensibility that makes her feel others' pain as if it were her own:
But far, far happier is the lot of those
Who never learn'd her dear delusive art;
Which, while it decks the head with many a rose,
Reserves the thorn to fester in the heart. (6-9)
Smith, like Coleridge, feels the pain of others. Her gift of sensibility, like his, "Points every pang, and deepens every sigh" (ln. 11), but instead of exalting her poetic genius, the tendency in our classroom was to trivialize it by identifying her as a "complainer" and rendering her female emotion as inconsequential. Why the difference in attitude, despite the similar theme? There is no easy answer to this paradox, but it is important to compare the "feminine" characteristics of the private sphere as they exist in women and men, and the different attitudes taken for against them in relation to the sex of the writer who claims them.
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